Mother’s Day is coming up and I’d like to do an homage to everything our mothers (or those who played the role) taught us—including, often unwittingly, about design.
So if your mom taught you something, anything, that’s shaped how you approach the craft of design, tell me all about it below! Our fave comments will appear in a Mother’s Day Webflow Blog post.
Haha, My Mom has zero design sense and apparently likes it that way. I try to give my input on a variety of things and she is happy to not care. The only thing she would come to me for is photo editing.
Haha, fair enough.
But I’m thinking of things that don’t necessarily relate to “design sense” per se.
Here’s a couple examples from the team that illustrate what I mean:
My mom taught me to go with my gut. That details can get in the way of the bigger picture and sometimes it’s better to just keep the momentum moving forward. (Obviously she didn’t teach me that for design specifically, but it’s definitely something I take with me in design.)
–Mat Vogels
My mom taught me two key things that shape how I approach writing content, which I think of as simply a different form of design:
1. Logical organization saves people a ton of frustration. When you know where to find something, you’re not only faster and more efficient when you’re working, you’re just a happier person. Not that I apply that lesson to my personal life.
2. Writing matter. My mother cared deeply about practical and efficient communication. In fact, she was the first person to teach me that cutting unnecessary language—especially empty, idiomatic phrases—helps you be clearer and more effective in writing. The one that really ground her gears was people’s constant use of “these ones”—as in, “Which donuts do you want?” “These ones.” She was always telling me: “It’s just these, John. You want these donuts.”
–me
My Mom acts as my free user tester.
Although my mom is not the best design wise, that makes it even more perfect because not all people are creatives, especially people who go on the Internet. There are all types of people on the Internet. (And a lot are just like my mom) and therefore I could use her skills as an advantage as to improve the UX of the site.
Hope this makes sense. 
@jmw I will probably add on more things tomorrow when I have some more time to think about it overnight. 
Definitely makes sense! And yes—always good to validate your ideas with people who don’t necessarily get design inside and out. Looking forward to more!
My Mom used to tell me about how websites used to look when the Internet first started to surface. She told me about how all websites had colored backgrounds, flashing images and were just plain terrible and that that was fine. It was something new and everyone wanted to play with it which meant people went crazy with their sites. People created websites simply for the sake of being able to say they have a website.
My mom created photo albums for every one of her kids (six total) that consisted of pictures of us as we were growing up and lots of poetry. She wrote the poetry in beautiful multi-colored type script. I only learned about this after I started designing in high school. I think I got my visual design sense from her. If she didn’t have to raise her six crazy kids she’d no doubt be the most famous typographer of our generation. 
The other day my mom told me I didn’t get my creativity from her. I must have got it from my father and lots of others around the family. She told me she doesn’t have any of that. I told her thats not true. “But i can’t even draw a sticky man” she said. But thats not about being creative. Being creative it’s about doing stuff. Look at your garden, I said, it’s beautiful. You could have chosen to just sit in your sofa watching teve but you choose to work in your garden making it pretty. That’s being creative.
My mom maybe didn’t teach me any web design but I proved her wrong not being creative.
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